THE WATERS OF TITAN | Artist Ron Miller's impression of the river systems on Titan. There's a lot more water in the solar system than we had thought, and that's just one of the incredible discoveries of 2012.

Yesterday we told you about the biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2012. But now we turn our attention to those developments that make us realize just how futuristic things are quickly becoming. More »

This was a pretty good year to be a fan of genre movies. More and more low-budget movies had the courage to tackle science fiction and fantasy themes, and meanwhile Hollywood seemed to step up its game a little. But at the same time, there were still tons of boring sequels and prequels, and mountains of crap. More »

Whether you feel 2012 has been a good year or a bad year, we can all probably agree that it's been a confusing year. A lot of weird things happened over the last 12 months - things we still can't quite believe occurred (and/or got approved by actual human beings). Here's eight things that happened in 2012 that we're still a bit boggled by. More »

This was an incredible year for science and engineering. We sent a powerful robot scientist to Mars, and we discovered the elusive Higgs Boson particle, plus there were world-changing innovations in medicine and materials science. We sequenced the genome of a human ancestor, and looked into the mind of an artificial intelligence that recognized the content of images on the web for the first time (of course it included cat faces). Here are the seventeen biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2012. More »

What were the most amazingly brilliant moments (and the most horrific scenes) delivered by the almighty television this year? We've rounded up the very best bits from a whole year of obsessive TV watching - along with some of the absolute worst. More »

This past year, we went on some amazingly strange journeys and made some bizarre discoveries. We ventured into realms of weird science, and delved into the meaning of pop culture. We asked some dangerous questions - and sometimes, the results were too complicated to boil down to a few snappy paragraphs. More »

2012 was a pretty epic year for visual trickery. We stared through telescopes, transfixed by Venus' cosmic trick of the light; gaped in disbelief at a Rubik's Cube that wasn't; and watched with morbid curiosity as celebrities transformed into grotesque mutations of their former selves. More »

This year was a great one for science fiction and fantasy that transcended genre boundaries. Novels that appeared to be science fiction turned out to be fantasies, and stories that began as outer space battles turned into thought-provoking meditations on the political future of humanity. More »

Each week, we've been looking at webcomics new and old, bringing you some of the best of what we've seen online. 2012 brought us a wide range of genre webcomics, from a fanciful tale of an artist and his editor that uses all three spatial dimensions to one of the sweetest fan comics DC has ever inspired. In no particular order, here are 10 of our favorite new scifi and fantasy webcomics of 2012. More »

This year, our eyes beheld some truly innovative and mind-blowing cosplay. We saw gender-swapped characters, Evil Dead hats, and elaborate costumes that included as many as five cosplayers. Not to mention Rockabilly Batman, Superhero Princesses, Furry Jesus, and a heap of characters straight out of Brian K. Vaughan's Saga. More »

In 2012, science fiction and fantasy accounted for the biggest box office hits, as well as the largest flops. The year's breakout hits on television were genre fare. The publishing landscape was transformed, and science fiction and fantasy drove the earth movers. Stories of the fantastic have never wielded so much power over mainstream culture, and there are a handful of people who did more to make it happen than anybody else. More »

Movie special effects have gotten better and better, but the big screen still can't deliver the kind of mind-blowing visuals and intricate, stare-for-hours detail that comics bring us. This year's greatest comics included some fantastic science fiction, some thrilling space opera - and a handful of superhero titles that made us celebrate the age of spandex. More »

This was a year of wild surprises and baffling mysteries. Pop culture threw us some curve-balls, and we didn't see them coming. Except when we did. Our attempts to predict the future had about a 50 percent success rate, in the face of crazy rumors and even crazier facts. For example, how did you like that Spider-Man cameo in The Avengers? More »

This year, io9 explored the outer limits of sexuality, from the most delightful pin-up art to the weirdest sex museums. We delved into indecent 1970s cosplay and incredibly strange films. We explored the history of porn featuring superheroes and space adventurers. Here's all the best NSFW content from io9 in 2012. More »